Jessica Lugo

I attribute much of my success to the strong support and encouragement of my husband. He consistently helps me recognize when I am ready for new challenges and motivates me to pursue new opportunities, sometimes even helping initiate the application process so I can focus on the interview and selection stages. With both of us sharing a background in mechanical engineering, we understand each other’s goals and continuously push one another to grow, and I consider his support and belief in my abilities to be a key factor in my career development.

The best advice I received was from one of my old managers who said to keep your work-life balance and understand where the bottlenecks are in terms of what's meaningful to you when you define success. Success to some people could be becoming a vice president at a company, or earning $500K a year. So understanding what success is early in your life, and then defining what that is in terms of that balance is what he gave me as advice. It's like, understand what success is, and then rate yourself against that definition that you gave yourself, because it's not the same to everybody.

My advice to young women entering engineering is to first define what success means for you and regularly measure your progress against that standard, rather than comparing yourself to others. I would also encourage them to see that it is absolutely possible to build a fulfilling career in engineering while navigating different life stages, including family and unexpected changes that may shift your perspective over time—and that’s okay. Most importantly, I want them to know that they belong in this field; women bring valuable perspectives and problem-solving approaches that complement those of men, and increasing representation is essential as the industry continues to grow, especially with the rising demand in technology.

I think the biggest challenge in my field is the fact that since I chose the technical route, there's bottlenecks with everything, and I've reached a bottleneck where it's gotten to the point that either I go and become a director and sacrifice the work-life balance that I have, or I stay in the technical as a technical lead. That's challenging because you have to find that sweet spot where you're like, alright, I need to be learning new things, I need to have a reason for me to wake up in the morning and go to work and still feel excited about it 30 years later. Understanding and having that perspective is important, and it's also challenging.

The values most important to me in both my work and personal life are accountability, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and upholding a strong ethical foundation built on integrity. I believe these principles guide how I show up professionally and personally, and they are essential to sustaining long-term success and trust in any environment I am part of.